The Death and Life of Broadway

American Literary History Advance Access published November 23, 2006 Through a Glass, Nostalgically: The Death and Life of Broadway Jeffrey Eric Jenkins Broadway is not necessarily geographic; it’s not a physical On Broadway: Art and locale. It’s an idea. Commerce on the Great White Way, Steven Adler. Roy Somlyo, producer1 Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, Broadway is a wide New York City avenue bisecting the Jazz Age, and the Manhattan. It begins at the base of the island and continues north- Birth of Broadway, erly for its entire length. For many consumers of American cul- Jerome Charyn. tural production, though, Broadway in the past century is better Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. known as the Great White Way, the Main Stem, the Big Street— synonymous with diversion, entertainment, stardom. This It Happened on Broadway, the one that created and sustains American myths Broadway: An Oral surrounding celebrity, has little to do with the wide street that once History of the Great led to the northern gate of seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. White Way, Myrna The “idea” of Broadway, as Roy Somlyo put it, began to Katz Frommer and coalesce as a term of art when an extravaganza, Broadway to Harvey Frommer. Tokio, opened on 23 January 1900 at the New York Theatre in University of Wisconsin Press, 1998; revised what is now known as Times Square. Although spectacles with edition, 2004. women in revealing costumes appeared on New York stages at least as far back as The Black Crook in 1866, it was Broadway to Kaufman & Co.: Tokio with its “gracefully executed saltatorial divertisements” that Broadway Comedies, codified the Broadway appellation as a signal of a theatrical ideal George S. Kaufman with (“Dramatic”). The production was also celebrated by an anon- Edna Ferber, Moss Hart, ymous reviewer from the New York Times for Fay Templeton’s Ring Lardner and Morrie Ryskind; edited winning performance “especially of an American ‘coon’ song” by Laurence Maslon. The and “a new darky ditty” (“Dramatic”). The audience pleasure Library of America, 2004. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins teaches theater history, theory, and criticism at New York University. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays in Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance and “Angels in American Theatre.” doi:10.1093/alh/ajl026 # The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] 2 The Death and Life of Broadway Broadway Boogie taken in the performance of minstrel songs—whether performed in Woogie: Damon Runyon blackface or not—was a tradition spanning more than six decades and the Making of by the beginning of the twentieth century, and it would continue New York City Culture, Daniel R. Schwarz. for several more. Two members of the team that created Broadway Palgrave Macmillan, to Tokio, composer A. Baldwin Sloane and lyricist George 2004. V. Hobart, later employed a familiar turn of phrase when they pre- miered The Belle of Broadway in 1902—a production that did not enjoy the success of their earlier “Broadway” collaboration.2 As the nascent century evolved, it was not long before “Broadway” became shorthand for the locus of cultural production as other theater artists employed it more frequently in production titles and as subject matter. Since 1900, at least 80 Broadway productions have included the term in their titles—a relatively small percentage, to be sure—but beyond the title the “idea” recurs frequently as theater artists reflexively celebrate the sporting world, the theatrical lifestyle, and the lives of artists. George M. Cohan’s iconic Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway appeared in 1906 and others followed with From Broadway to the Bowery (1907), Broadway After Dark (1907), Mr. Hamlet of Broadway (1908), The Man Who Owns Broadway (1909) and Up and Down Broadway (1910). Although these are but a few of the hundreds of productions in the five-year span of 1906–10, they demonstrate a growing affinity—in title and subject matter—with a lively theatrical demimonde that would later be exported nationally through the writing of columnists such as Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell, and in film representations of show business. 1 Yeah, well, artists are a lot like gangsters. They both know that the official version, the one everyone else believes, is a lie. Jocko, a small-time gangster3 Recent books by Jerome Charyn and Daniel R. Schwarz examine New York’s Jazz-Age culture macroscopically and micro- scopically, respectively. Both authors recount the cultural milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, with Charyn tending toward imaginative leaps linking literature to actual events. Schwarz, however, grounds his argument in historical context and a close reading of a particular subject: the sportswriter and columnist Damon Runyon. Charyn’s Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz American Literary History 3 Age, and the Birth of Broadway (2005) is a tale of the Times Square area as it gradually evolved from the seamy Tenderloin into the glittering Great White Way. The author of more than 30 other books, Charyn is a journalistic writer with a facility for pulling pithy quotes from other works to help construct his narrative. Although he credits underlying sources in the scantest of end- notes, there is nothing in the text to point the reader to them. Examination of the notes and the bibliography reveal Charyn’s debt to various essays in William R. Taylor’s Inventing Times Square (1991). At times it seems as though readers might be better advised to read Taylor for a sharper picture of the ideas underpin- ning Charyn’s narrative, but the swaggering prose of Gangsters and Gold Diggers sets it apart from the more serious urban-studies work in Inventing Times Square. Charyn’s cast of characters is readily accessible to the casual reader: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Florenz Ziegfeld, Al Jolson, Louise Brooks, Fanny Brice and Billy Rose, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, with Damon Runyon accompanied by a roster of glamorized criminals. The author’s Broadway is a raucous frontier town where women are for sale, African Americans are nearly invisible—except in blackface performances onstage—and thugs are practitioners of a subcultural noblesse oblige. Using The Great Gatsby (1925) as one of his sources for reconstructing the era, Charyn draws parallels between Fitzgerald’s characters and real persons. Indeed, the author repeatedly teases details from American cultural production, ties them to actual persons, and then critiques fiction’s fidelity to reality. (In some of these commentaries, Charyn very nearly emerges as a frustrated film critic—or screenwriter.) In the author’s examination of the romance between William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, he reveals a theme to which he often returns. Throughout the text, Charyn valorizes an ideal of women as objects of the male gaze in Florenz Ziegfeld’s annual Follies and other shows where chorus girls were visual commod- ities. In a coda to the book, Charyn visits a movie theater in Times Square to see Rob Marshall’s 2002 rendering of the musical Chicago. After a litany of complaints about the now “bloodless Broadway,” Charyn loses himself in the film: Legs abound, long legs, as female bodies dart across the screen like so many scissors. We’re in some club that could be a Chicago version of Texas Guinan’s El Fey, with a pint- sized stage that’s packed with dancing daughters, every 4 The Death and Life of Broadway single one a gold digger.... [It] is as close as I’ll ever get to my Broadway. (236–37) The author’s consistent celebration of young female bodies foregrounds his particular Broadway interest. It is astonishing, though, that Charyn’s Broadway does not consider the work—or person—of even one playwright at a time when American dramatic literature was in full flower. Eugene O’Neill received three Pulitzer Prizes in the 1920s, but the decade also marked the blossoming of George S. Kaufman, Maxwell Anderson, Edna Ferber, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, George Abbott, and Ben Hecht—the last mentioned in passing, the others not at all. Even as these esteemed playwrights were creating an American dramatic literature, New York City authorities—unable to stanch the flow of illegal booze—attempted to regulate theatrical morality through license revocation, prosecution for stage indecency, and the use of censor- ious “play juries” appointed by the District Attorney. However, as Charyn might say, that Broadway would not be his Broadway. In Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture (2004), Daniel R. Schwarz approaches the era from a more scholarly perspective. An English Professor at Cornell, Schwarz spends 322 pages working his way through salient points in Damon Runyon’s life—an inversion of Horace Greeley’s invocation to “go west”—as Runyon made his way from Colorado to New York. Although there is some overlap between Charyn and Schwarz, the latter tends to back his asser- tions with historical context, serious analysis, and careful notation. For most who think of Runyon and Broadway, the musical Guys and Dolls is probably what comes to mind, but Runyon’s Times Square habitue´s descended from a long line of marginalized characters whose lives the journalist and proletarian poet had chronicled. Through imaginative use of dialogs enlivened by American dialects—soldiers in camp, souses in a bar, a pug fighter in negotiation—the Hearst-syndicated Runyon allowed readers throughout the country a glimpse of life lived at the fringe of society. Reading early magazine work of Runyon’s, before his move to New York, it is possible even to imagine the writer as an inspiration to the incipient playwright Eugene O’Neill.4 In a 1907 Runyon story about a group of soldiers, published in McClure’s Magazine, one finds dialog that wouldn’t be out of place in one of O’Neill’s sea plays from 1916 to 1917: “Onct I belonged to the milish,” remarked Private Hanks, curled up luxuriously on his cot and sending long, spiral wreaths of smoke ceiling-ward.

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